Ruby is an object-oriented scripting language designed by Yukihiro Matsumoto, known in the community as “Matz.” According to Ruby’s own About page, the language was created to blend the strengths of several earlier languages: Matz wanted “a scripting language that was more powerful than Perl, and more object-oriented than Python.” Ruby was publicly released in 1995.
A defining trait of Ruby is its emphasis on the experience of the programmer rather than the machine. The official material describes Matz’s goal of “trying to make Ruby natural, not simple,” and frames the language as something meant to feel comfortable and expressive to write. In Ruby almost everything is an object, including values that many other languages treat as primitives.
Matz has described the design as deceptively layered, calling the language “simple in appearance, but very complex inside, just like our human body.” This focus on making programmers comfortable and productive, rather than optimizing purely for raw performance, became one of Ruby’s most influential ideas.
Ruby achieved broad mainstream adoption in 2006, when user groups formed worldwide and Ruby conferences filled to capacity. Much of that surge came from a web framework written in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, which carried Ruby’s philosophy of programmer happiness into web development.